Staging one's travel
Reasons for traveling vary depending on the stage of a researcher's career. In 2001, Scott Armstrong, MD, PhD, and colleagues in the DFCI laboratory of Stanley Korsmeyer, MD, published a paper describing a unique form of infant leukemia they had identified using microarray, or "gene chip," analysis. It was a big finding, and for the first time in his young career, Armstrong was in high demand.
Traveling on the lecture circuit helped Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, (second from left) recruit such colleagues as Drs. Geoff Girnun, Chris Walkey, and Jiandie Lin.
He made many ensuing trips — to the NIH, the National Academy of Sciences, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and even Amsterdam. To a degree, he admits, they were distracting — but he says they were worth it for a junior scientist just beginning to make his mark.
"A lot of people had read my paper, and this was an opportunity to get to know others in the field," Armstrong says. "That, in turn, leads to more collaborations and ideas."
For a senior figure in the field, travel provides different incentives. Trips that Kieran deems valuable fall into several categories. He attends the major conferences, including annual meetings of the American Society for Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research, in part because he serves on leadership committees. He'll also accept some lecture invitations, particularly those in New England and upstate New York at institutions that refer brain tumor patients to DFCI.
Although his focus is pediatric brain tumors, Kieran finds it worthwhile to also attend meetings about treatments for such tumors in adults, who generally receive experimental drugs before they are tested in children. "I can predict what will happen in kids three years from now by what is happening with adults today," he says.
Liability concerns and the small market in pediatric brain tumor drugs make pharmaceutical companies reluctant to test such medications in children, according to Kieran. He feels he should attend meetings where he can lobby company officials to offer the drugs for pediatric clinical trials at Dana-Farber. "Sometimes the personal approach does make a difference," he says.
"When we have a paper in an important journal, I get out and talk about it."
— Bruce Spiegelman, PhD
Although he is not a researcher, DFCI's Chief Operations Officer Jim Conway has traveled extensively in recent years to speak and consult on patient-safety practices. Spurred by a fatal medical error at Dana-Farber in 1994, Conway and others on the staff have been at the forefront of a national effort to prevent such mistakes. He estimates he's given 125 presentations on the subject in the last seven years, noting that the Institute's approach to patient safety is now considered a national model.
Conway, who tries to lecture outside Greater Boston no more than once a month, says, "I prefer going someplace where I can learn something to bring back to Dana-Farber." Trips to Children's Hospital in Minneapolis and the Intermountain Health Care system in Utah, for example, aided Conway and others in formulating DFCI policies relating to patient safety. When conferring with government officials in Washington, D.C., on another sojourn, Conway took away ideas that made their way into a medication-safety brochure Dana-Farber helped develop.
There's no place...
Ultimately, most globetrotting tourists return with a newfound appreciation for home. And Dana-Farber scientists express similar feelings about returning to the Institute and the Longwood Medical Area.
"When you give talks at different places," Guinan remarks, "you recognize how extraordinary our own resources are. You take it for granted unless you look at them anew." After such trips, she says, "I come back with more inspiration — and ideas on how to make better use of all that we have here."
